1. Field of the invention
The present disclosure relates to diagnostic apparatus and method for home appliances, and more particularly, to diagnostic apparatus and method for home appliances which facilitate accurate diagnosis and an after-sales service by checking the status of home appliances on the basis of the product information of the home appliances, diagnosing a breakdown, and feeding back the diagnosis result.
2. Description of the Related Art
Home appliances store values related to operation, information generated during operation, breakdown information, and the like while performing a predetermined operation, and particularly, when a breakdown occurs, home appliances may allow the user to recognize the statuses of the home appliances by outputting a predetermined alarm. Such home appliances not only simply let the user know completion of an operation or generation of a breakdown, but output detailed breakdown information, using an output unit, for example, a display unit or a lamp.
When a fault or error occurs during operation of a home appliance, the user generally calls an after-sales service center, explains the problem with the home appliance, and asks for a solution to the problem. However, it is not easy for the user to accurately recognize the state of the home appliance and explain that status to the after-sales service center, and so the user has difficulty solving the problem.
In particular, it frequently occurs that a repairer unnecessarily visits the user's home when an abnormal symptom of a home appliance is not due to a breakdown of the home appliance, but actually due to mishandling by the user.
Therefore, the user may solve the abnormal symptom by himself/herself, if the symptom of the home appliance is accurately found out so that a solution for the symptom may be provided.
However, there is a problem in that noise or distortion is generated in accordance with the characteristics of a communication network through which a sound is transmitted, when diagnosing the status of a home appliance by outputting the product information of the home appliance, using a sound, and by analyzing the received sound.
U.S. application Ser. No. 12/431,903 describes setting a symbol time, which is an output time for a frequency of a signal sound, to be a predetermined length to solve the problem in transfer rate in that noise or a signal is not transmitted in accordance with the characteristics of the communication network when outputting a signal sound that outputs the product information of a home appliance with a predetermined sound.
However, although the symbol time is set in consideration of the transfer rate, there is a problem in that distortion is generated in accordance with the characteristics of the communication network while the signal is transmitted to the service center.
Since there is a difference in processing of real-time data and common data particularly for portable terminals, there is a problem in that the service center extracts the accurate product information by receiving the signal.